


caught in the crossfire

by WelcomeToTheBadlands (orphan_account)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Friends, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Legends, Mutual Pining, Mythology - Freeform, Once and Future King, Slow Burn, Tags May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21703237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/WelcomeToTheBadlands
Summary: Magic has been outlawed for as long as anyone can remember, but there are still remnants of the Old World that give people hope. For instance, the sword in the stone. People hope that one day the Once and Future King will come back and remove the unjust laws against magic users._Ben Solo and Rey met in the not-so-nicest way to meet. But she felt like she could trust him more than she could trust most other people.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	1. Chapter 1

  
There are three rules to surviving the big city if you have magic. 

  
**One, live alone. Roommates are liabilities.** You don’t want to get caught. 

  
**Two, don’t invite people into your life. Friends are liabilities.** This was how most people got turned in to the Capitol nowadays, by telling the people they trust. You can’t trust people, especially since that see something say something campaign that Senator Thomas Snoke rolled out came into effect. 

**Three, don’t live anywhere near your family.** No one in his own family knew the secrets that he held, he had moved further away from anyone, and once Luke Skywalker had died he took over his security company and made a name for himself. Everyone thought that he was an asshole of a boss and that was fine. 

It was better that way. No one looked into his personal life that way.   
Each day he went through life thinking that it was for the best, that he didn’t have any attachments. It kept him alive. 

__

There are three rules to surviving the big city when you’re poor and a political activist that’s not very favorited by the government. 

**One, live with roommates.** Everything is cheaper with roommates, and they’ll report it if you go missing. 

**Two, invite people into your life.** The more you make your presence heard, the more people are likely to make sure that you don’t starve, that you take care of yourself. Rey is naturally charismatic, so that helps. People think she’s just and someone that needs to be heard. It helps her and her best friend Finn keep the lights on. 

**Three, live near your family.** Rey’s family is the family that she’s found. Rose, Finn, Jannah, and Poe (despite the fact that he annoys the shit out of her). Whenever she’s lonely, any one of them makes sure that she’s okay (even Poe). 

__

There are some people that hope for a day when magic becomes accepted again. When dragons stop being hunted and vampires, witches, and werewolves aren’t prosecuted for who they are anymore. They point to the sword in the stone, remind people that King Arthur, the Once and Future king, was an accepting and kind person. 

Ben knew all of the Arthurian legends, every single one of them. He knew them all so well because the Skywalkers were the ones that guarded the sword in the stone for all these years. Anakin was the first one to monetize people trying to take it out of the stone. 

Rich people paid for the chance every day, and it had given Ben enough money to live comfortably. He got so sick and tired of influencers posing with it that for a little while, he had actually considered not letting anyone else touch it, but as Gwen Phasma reminded him, a lot of people worked at the museum like structure that only rich people could afford to go into to get a chance to try and pull the sword out. 

They needed their jobs. Even though Ben told himself not to care about others, he could never actually bring himself to doing something that would make people go hungry or lose their homes.  
So, the sword stayed open for people to take that opportunity. (Ben also never understood why it was always men who tried to get the sword out of the stone. Descendants and reincarnates could be women as well, even if it was a reincarnation of King Arthur.)

No one was ever going to get it though. At least the people that could afford it wouldn’t be able to, and Ben wasn’t sure why people didn’t realize that. No asshole wearing five hundred-dollar Gucci shoes that looked like socks was going to be a descendant of King Arthur. 

So, the Once and Future King would not save the people that were being hunted. People needed to realize that no one would save them. No hero would make things better for them. There was no reason to have any hope. 

  
Because one day, you were going to lose it.

Ben Solo had hope once. That was a long time ago, before he grew up and isolated himself. At some point, he let go of the hope he had.  
It was the only way to survive.

__

One thing Rey knows well is that pain is a part of the human experience, but so is hope. Hope is such a big part of the human experience, and it’s the thing that keeps people going. They get up, take care of themselves, take care of the people that they love, go to work and come back home because of hope. 

They hope for a better future than the one that they had, and Rey was one of those people. She got up, went to work, cleaned the inside of the Skywalker museum with Finn and then went home, ate and went to sleep and then repeated. 

Because she wanted to get out of this crummy apartment with heat that always broke down and she wanted to be somewhere where she felt safe.   
In between the repeating, there were the little glimmers of hope, though. The moments of hope were the moments when she made her friends smile, despite the shitty circumstances they were all in.

The moments of hope were the moments that she would speak out when the government did something shitty and people actually heard her. 

It was something that made her feel important, and it made a change. Magical creatures that weren’t sentient were not allowed to be hunted in both Jakku and Chandrila because of her. That had to count for something. 

She had a voice.

She had hope and she wasn’t going to let that go. 

__

Both Ben Solo and Rey ride the train to the same place every day. It’s always Ben who bumps into Rey at 6:33 in the morning, an hour later he always remarks how it smells like cinnabons, it’s always Rey heating up a pastry in another room on her break.

Every day around ten thirty, they get on the train and ride back, they take the same car, they read the same book.

No one ever notices the other.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> btw this fic is inspired by Merlin (BBC) if you can't tell

Ben Solo was good at three things and three things alone:

  1. **Blending in.**



When he was younger, he just melted into his group class pictures and then disappeared. People didn’t remember him from high school, he was just another face in the crowd. That was the way he lived. That was the way that he would always have to live.

  1. **Holding his tongue.**



This was key in making sure that he didn’t reveal the fact that he had magic. A lot of the times, people would talk about witches in derogatory terms. They’d be the butt of jokes. They’d be the subject of all of the conversations that Ben didn’t want to hear.

He used to have a bad temper.

It was now subdued under all of the exhaustion of interacting with people and getting older.

  1. **Sleeping.**



Ben had insomnia, but when he did sleep, he slept hard. It was the best feeling in the world, practicing for death.

So satisfying.

__

There were three things that Rey was good at and three things alone:

  1. **Sticking out.**



Even when she wanted to blend in and say nothing, she would often find herself being picked out of a crowd. People asked if she was that girl that led that one march or if she fixed their car back in March. The answer was yes to both of those questions, because every once and a while Rey helped out at Jannah’s garage to make some extra cash.

  1. **Letting her voice be heard.**



Mostly when she thought that someone had a stupid opinion and she couldn’t take the thought of keeping her criticism inside. She was the type of person to let other people know when they were being stupid, no matter how harsh it sounded coming from her lips.

  1. **Staying up way later than necessary.**



You learned how to keep busy when you worked multiple jobs.

It was just like that sometimes. Rey hated to sleep anyways. 

When Rey was in the foster system, her foster parents always made the decision to get rid of her in her sleep. Rey guessed that that always stuck with you.

__

This time Rey decides not take the train the day that Ben Solo finally buys a car. She started to bike right as Ben Solo left the parking lot of his apartment complex. Both are exactly twenty-five minutes away from their work, coming from completely different sides of the city.

They both make it to work without incident, and clock in at the exact same time.

__

Today was one of the days where Rey was working with almost everybody that she knew. Finn, Rose, and Jannah were all working today. Everyone except Poe. They should have been working, that’s what their bosses would’ve said, but they had devised a system that helped them get done a lot earlier than usual.

At night, sometimes one of them would sneak in some sangria and they would all drink and watch Netflix together. They did the same tonight, inhabiting the room with the sword in the stone. Rey had to admit that she had a little too much to drink that night and she was hiccupping. So when Jannah said, “Hey, we should take turns and see if any one of us can take the sword out of the stone.” She thought that that sounded like a really great idea.

It sounded too good to her ears in fact.

First, Finn went. “You want to bet that it’s going to be one of us and not one of those rich asshole influencers that Solo lets take Instagram selfies next to the sword?”

“That would—that’d be really funny.” Rose hiccupped. “I doubt that would actually happen, but it would be really funny.”

He wrapped his hand around the hilt of the sword and pulled for a good two minutes. “Be careful,” Jannah said, “you might shit yourself if you try any harder.”

“Hahaha,” Finn rolled his eyes. “I would like to see you try,”

“Okay,” Jannah tried, and she got the exact same result as Finn. Then Rose, although she didn’t try very hard. “Rey? It’s your turn,” Jannah called. Rey was still sipping from Rose’s bottle of sangria when she stared at all of them.

“Oh, I don’t think that I would be able to—”

“Oh come on, Rey. Please. We all did it, you should to.” It was peer pressure that got her to wrap her hands around the hilt of the blade. Her skin felt pleasantly warm, and an underlying wave of electrical current made it tingle.

__

_“Listen, Merlin. I need to tell you something.” Arthur could feel his last breaths escaping his lips. “I never want you to stop being you,” He wasn’t even sure if he was making sense at this point. “Just—thank you.”_

__

The blade slid out of the stone like it was passing through butter. Rey was silent for a second before saying, “What the fuck?”

__

Ben remembered the first time that he did magic. It was an accident. Of course, it always started with an accident. His mother had sent him to his room for losing his temper and when he slammed the door he started crying. The lights in his room started to short and all the sudden his lava lamp exploded. His mother started running up the stairs and Ben was panicking.

He wished that the lava lamp would put itself back together.

And it did.

That’s the way he found out there was something wrong with him.

__

Ben rarely ever had outbursts where he couldn’t control his magic anymore, but something happened late one night when he was trying to sleep. His skin felt screaming hot, like he was getting a fever. A wave of anxiety was threatening to crash over him, and he had no idea why. The furniture in his room started to rattle, and then the water glass on his nightstand flew across the room and smashed into millions of crystalline pieces on the table.

__

_“I thought we were friends, Morgana.”_

_“As did I,”_

__

There had been an awakening.

Of what kind, Ben wasn’t sure. But the taste of an energy was palpable in his mouth, and he wasn’t sure that it was a good kind of energy. He was unable to sleep as the dawn came, a lot earlier than he expected it to come. He drove to work again, driving recklessly as he was used to and nearly hitting a girl as she biked across the crosswalk. He stopped before he did though. She wasn’t even wearing a helmet. _Now that was just natural selection._

Her response was to put her middle finger when Ben rolled down his window and yell, “Pedestrians have the right of way, asshole!” She looked like she was on the verge of panic attack, her three buns coming loose and undone.

“Technically you’re a biker, not a pedestrian. Put on a fucking helmet if you’re so worried about getting hit.” The girl rolled her eyes and biked away. They both forgot about the exchange within the next hour.

__

When Ben Solo got to work, the first words he heard were crisis, and ‘the sword is gone’.

“What the fuck?”

“The sword is gone,” Mitaka offered dumbly.

“The whole sword and the stone or—”

“The sword. Just the sword. Someone took the sword out of the stone.” _What the fuck?_

“Have you checked the tapes?”

“The tapes have been erased, sir.”


End file.
